Please note that this is an extremely conservative analysis: all

Please note that this is an extremely conservative analysis: all conjunction analyses tested the conjunction null hypothesis, i.e., a “logical AND” AZD8055 concentration (Nichols et al., 2005), with all contrasts thresholded at p < 0.05 (FWE whole-brain corrected), and the combination of these conjunctions across both studies corresponded to a double logical AND. The results reported so far refer to the outcome prediction error ε2; this is the (precision-weighted) difference between the actual visual stimulus outcome and its a priori probability

(i.e., before trial outcome observation). However, we can also use the predictions from our model to examine activations reflecting choice prediction error εch; this is the difference between the correctness of the subject’s choice and the a priori probability of this choice being correct (see the Supplemental Experimental Procedures, section B, for formal definitions of both PEs). In both fMRI studies, choice PEs evoked prominent activations (p < 0.05 FWE whole-brain KPT-330 ic50 corrected; Figure 5) in numerous regions, including the bilateral ventral striatum, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, OFC and ACC (for a complete list, see Table S7). Activations

of these regions are commonly found for reward PEs, and it is remarkable that we obtain a similar activation pattern even though in our studies learning was orthogonal to reward (fMRI study 1) and reward were absent (fMRI study 2). Finally, it is notable that the activation of the ventral striatum also extended into the basal forebrain, as delineated by our anatomical mask (p < 0.05 FWE corrected for the entire mask volume). Subsequently, we investigated precision-weighted PEs at the next higher level of the hierarchy in our Bayesian model. This PE, ε3, concerns the cue-outcome contingency, i.e., the probability (in logit space) of the visual stimulus category given the auditory

cue, and is used to update estimates of log-volatility at the third level of the HGF. We found that the trial-wise expression of this PE correlated positively with activity in the septal part of the cholinergic basal forebrain (Table 2; Figure 6). In both fMRI studies, this activation was significant (p < 0.05) when corrected for multiple comparisons across aminophylline the volume of our anatomically defined mask (that included all cholinergic and dopaminergic nuclei in brain stem and subcortex). In this study, three independent groups of healthy volunteers (n = 118 in total) performed an audio-visual associative learning task that required explicit predictions about an upcoming visual stimulus category (face or house) given a preceding auditory cue. Because the cue-outcome contingencies were varying unpredictably in time, optimal performance required hierarchical learning about conditional stimulus probabilities and their change in time.